Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Transition Animations

I'm starting to give some thought to transition animations in the game. Like everything else in the game, my decision to add a cape to my character is is adding a lot of extra work for me. Luckily, the animation is so small on the screen and everything is moving so fast, that I can probably get away with just a couple of inbetweens for each transition. I just don't know how many transitions I will need. As of now, I'd love to have a couple of frames for when you are swiching from from moving left to right while your flying and running. I'm probably going to also need some for when I'm flying down and and go up. After I get those done, I'll have a better idea of the kind of things I'll need to flesh out the rest.

3 comments:

Wow! Transition animations aren't a common thing in games I think your "multianimated" hero character may be a strong point (I thing all of your characters will be made perfectly, what I saw on your earlier sketches) :-]

Btw: I'd like to ask you:Have you made some graphics of backgrounds for your game? For now, I see that you created sketches of buildings, and I would like to know if you have already some more, coloured backgrounds. I ask because at the moment I'm getting tired of this type of problem in my game, so I'f you have an experience of creating backgrounds, or if you have some links to the tutorials (personally I haven't found any of them), could you send it for me? I mean just about something like backround in Ashey Gullen platform game tutorial on Scirra forum - simply, if there are some tricks do make background like that, or we just need to draw it pixel by pixel. Personally I used to make draws on paper first, and then transfer it to the PC, but I manage to use this method only for characters (not for backgrounds).

I haven't actually started on the background art, but plan to very soon. I keep going back and forth on whether or not to do it completely flat or have a little bit of perspective (tilt the camera). I think I'm going to take the plunge and just start pretty soon though.

I would suggest drawing it by hand, scanning it into the computer, and then coloring it there. I found a blog a while back that has a lot of tutorials on drawing for games called: http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.com/

I'm pretty sure that he is using a free vector program called Inkscape to draw with. You can find it here: http://inkscape.org/

You might want to check out some of these too. Though I'm not sure how many deal specifically with backgrounds: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/pixel-art-tutorials/

But I would start by thinking about what you want in your background and finding a few photos of each thing. Having photo reference in front of you helps to give you ideas about how to draw these things.

Feel free to show me anything you come up with and I'll give you some pointers. Just keep trying and don't get frustrated. Some times it takes a little while to get warmed up.

Also, I'm sorry I haven't been able to get a picture of that glitch over to you. I'll try and get it to you by the end of the week. Good luck and keep me posted!